BDD in Action: Using Concordion

John,
Looking at the book's Table of Contents, I see mention of tools like Spock, Jasmine, and Selenium 2, but I don't see anything about Concordion (http://www.concordion.org). I'm wondering if you've got any experience with it, and if it's mentioned it in the book?

I like it partly because it's HTML based, so it's easy for anyone to see what the project's current status is; they just navigate to the project's web site and look at the story pages they're interested in. I also like it because you can use other tools like Selenium, or Spock to actually write the test code called by Concordion - so you can leverage any experience you already have with test frameworks, while giving non-technical folks a nice web site to see how things are currently standing.

On the site, it says Concordion is an ATDD tool, but I think it fits in with BDD because you can create user stories expressing the desired behavior (aka executable specifications) and drive the development from there.

I've used Concordion, and will probably include a bit of material on it. It can be classed as a BDD tool, though some might use a stricter definition that restricts BDD to the Given/When/Then and RSpec-style tools. The HTML flexibility in Concordion is nice, but personally I found it harder to scale and to integrate with a broader feature coverage reporting (as opposed to just test results), where you integrate with other tools that keep track of the stories and requirements (e.g. JIRA), and report not only on what tests were executed, but what requirements were tested, and what were not. I have had more success using JBehave/Thucydides for this.

Burk Hufnagel
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posted Sep 05, 2013 13:30:36

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Thanks for the reply.

The main thing I like about Concordion is that it's not a developer tool. During a meeting with the business folks I can start entering their stories - or even copy text from prior emails - so they can see that we're building what they're asking for. Of course there's usually some clarification needed on what the specific result should be, but it's very non-threatening to non-technical folks because it's HTML and most everyone's at least seem it before.

The other nice thing is that you can look at the pages and see what's working and what's not. You can do this with tools like Spock too, but somehow seeing the originally agreed stories turning green just feels good.